About

As UF's Digital Scholarship Librarian, my work focuses on socio-technical (people, policies, technologies, communities) needs for scholarly cyberinfrastructure. I work heavily with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) where I am the Digital Scholarship Director, Digital Humanities Working Group and the DH Graduate Certificate, LibraryPress@UF where I am the Editor-in-Chief, and Research Computing with these and other activities geared towards enabling a culture of radical collaboration that values and supports diversity and inclusivity. Thoughts are my own. Pronouns: she, her, hers; or, we, our, ours.

Please Support Create Caribbean following Hurricane Maria

Please Support Create Caribbean following Hurricane Maria

Thanks to Dr. Schuyler Esprit for sharing this information, and the opportunity to help support the critically important work being done with Create Caribbean, the first Digital Humanities Center in the Caribbean. Please donate: https://www.gofundme.com/create-caribbean-postmaria-funds

On September 18, Hurricane Maria ripped through Dominica and inflicted massive destruction on our beautiful island. Create Caribbean, the digital humanities research institute that I’ve worked to develop over the last four years, suffered significant loss, especially to our building and equipment. Our student interns also suffered personal losses; some of them have lost personal items including books and computers, some lost their homes.

It is now more important than ever for Create Caribbean to live up to its mandate to “bridge academic excellence, tech empowerment, and civic engagement to build a better Caribbean.” Please take a moment to read our story, support if you can and share with your friends and colleagues to help us get back to work for the future of this region: https://www.gofundme.com/create-caribbean-postmaria-funds

From the GoFundMe page:

For the last three years, Create Caribbean Research Institute has worked with young people to bridge academic excellence, tech empowerment and civic engagement to build a better Caribbean. This summer, our Create and Code technology education program for children ages 7-16 immersed its participants in thinking about and building innovative tools to raise awareness for forest and marine preservation. Since 2015, the student interns of the Research and Service Learning Program collaboration with Dominica State College have been building a research and action resource for environmental sustainability at carisealand.org.

On Thursday, September 14, the group of interns met with the directors for their first colloquium session of the semester to plan their areas of concentration for developing digital media content (PSAs, short films, animations), public murals, and teaching resources for primary and secondary schools. The topics included: wildlife and forest biodiversity; land displacement and building construction; food and water security; environmental justice and community impacts; economic and political costs of climate change; arts and activism for environmental and social change, among others.

Four days later, Hurrican Maria ripped through our home of Dominica as a Category Five storm forever changing our view of our world and the sanctity of our beautiful nature island. Now, more than ever, Create Caribbean commits itself to using technology, humanities and research to not only raise awareness about sustainability and climate change resilience, but also to ACT, in our small and larger ways on making consistent and determined change in our local communities. But we need your help.

As we build back, we need help in replacing some of the important technology equipment and operational resources lost during the storm. These include laptops, projectors, phones. We need help with getting our interns back on their feet so they can begin work again – they’ve lost clothes, books, school supplies, their personal laptops and tablets during the wind and rain torment of September 18. We need help in getting immediate resources for us to get back to work.

We’ve decided our first goal is to return to our environmental sustainability project (carisealand.org) and to integrate our research there into our first community project: home learning reinforcement project for students of primary and secondary school. Although schools are trying to get back to normal for Dominica’s students, many schools are unable to re-open and some students will just generally need more support outside the classroom. Create Caribbean interns will tutor and mentor students through a home learning project in conjunction with partnering schools and community groups. To effectively do that, we need support in terms of electrictity supply, funds to support mobile data, transportation and water and food for our interns during their volunteer activities.

We are ready to get back to building a better Caribbean. With your help, we can start today.